ECCB 2016 Den Hague, Netherlands computational Biologist and Bioinformaticians gatherings at a sweet Dutch country !

I have been to several conferences within India, while ECCB 2016 which happened in Den Hague, from September 3 2016 - September 7 2016. It was the first time for me travel outside India, had butterflies on my stomach the day before I travel.The trip really went well. It was a gathering of computational Biologist and Bioinformaticians over the world. Well I should thank Department of Science and Technology, Government of India for providing me the travel award. The Meeting started with the workshop on discussing Pacbio and Nanopore data. Expertise from the field of nanopore and Pacbio were discussing the problems with the long reads. People were complaining about the "error rates" of these reads, and difficulties in genome assembly of these reads. Had a great opportunity to discuss with the experts. The Nanopore experts were suggesting that Canu assembler can do better when handling the problematic regions in the genome. The Miniasm and Racon assembler also be tried . There were sessions about Irys to create a genome map and align the created  map back to the genome assembly to get a better genome assembly. The structural variants and the comparative genomics are also studied from the graph. Next topic was using Isoseq from pacific Bio-systems to produce a full length transcripts without assembly, followed by promethion and squiggle sequencing system from nanopore technology"Read Until " approach it enables selection of individual DNA molecules for sequencing from a pool of DNA molecules. Then there was a session of Minotour where the base calling of the nanopore reads where done without performing the cloud base calling since there is a dependency of high speed internet. The developers of the tools and technologies were very friendly and gave suggestions on working with the long reads. after the workshop the conference scientific sessions started and many interesting talks where there, I was more interested towards the error correction algorithm development, genome assembly tools, new ortholog prediction tools. Most of the sessions and posters where about the cancer ( a devil), and ENCODE. I can say that 60% of people presented towards cancer transcriptomics and genomics, and 30 % of work in ENCODE, rest where like plant, bacteria, database development, Docking and simulations. The talks and discussions can be retrieved from twitter via #ECCB2016.  I liked the theme of the conference here not only PhD students and Scientists were presenting the work, even people working in companies were also showcased the ongoing work.Some people were very happy and showed interest towards the  poster of my PhD work, since its a plant pathogen. I am more interested towards studying the environmental organisms, pathogens of human, discovering various new species from the environment. About the food it was good, had a varieties of cheese. I had time to visit Amsterdam its a very nice place with a polite people. Visited churches, Museum, had a good canal Boat riding.I had few friends from conference and joined with them and rented a boat and rode over the Amsterdam city. The future ECCB2017 conference will be held in Prague.